Lightweight methodology

Transcription

So now let's talk about a specific agile method, which is also one of the first ones, extreme programming, also called XP. And to introduce XP, I'm going to start with a quote. The quote says XP is a lightweight methodology for small to medium sized teams developing software in the face of vague or rapidly-changing requirements. And this is a quote from Kent Beck the American Software Engineer that created extreme programming. And by the way Beck was one of the original 17 developers who signed the manifesto in 2001. And as you can see we are still talking about the methodology. So we are not just talking about going out and just start writing software. There are principles. And there are practices that we need to follow, but we're going to do it in a much more agile, and a much more flexible ways than we did for our software processes. And also note that the vague and rapidly changing requirements are explicitly mentioned, because this is really one of the important parts about all of this agile methodologies. so what is XP? XP is a. Lightweight. Humanistic. Discipline. Of software development. It is lightweight because it doesn't overburden the developers with an invasive process. So process is kept to a minimum. It's humanistic because as we said, it's centered on people. People, developers, customers, are at the center of the process. It's a discipline, as we said, it includes practices that we to Follow. And finally, is of course about software development. Software development is a key point of the whole method. In XP, developing is like driving, imagine having a road, a wind road, we need to able to drive our car down the road, take the abrupt turns, react promptly to changes, for example obstacles on the road. So, in a nutshell, change is the only constant. Eyes always have to be on the road and it's about steering and not pointing, and XP is trying to do the same thing, while creating softer systems. In XP we need to adopt a mentality of sufficiency, what does that mean? How would you program if you had all the time in the world? No time constraints at all, you will probably write tests instead of skipping them, because there's no more resources. You will probably restructure your code often, because you see opportunities to improve it, and you will take them. And you will probably talk to fellow programmers and with the customer, interact with them, and this is actually the kind of mentality that XP is trying to promote and agile processes in general. And we will see that the following some of the practices that XP is advocating, you can actually achieve these goals and you can actually behave in this way. And the development process is going to benefit overall.